A FIRST NATIONS STORY GRACEFULLY TOLD
Richard Wagamese’s latest novel should finally give him the recognition he deserves
Not a word is wasted, either in the dialogue or the narrative itself, but Wagamese is able to evoke entire worlds out of the simplest of passages.
Respect is one thing; attention is quite another.
Despite a long and rightly lauded career, Richard Wagamese has never received the attention his work so richly deserves. A multiple prizewinner, Wagamese’s books have inexplicably slipped just under the surface of public awareness ( and don’t get me started on how his last novel Indian Horse, one of the best books of 2012, somehow failed to appear on the radar of the major literary prizes, an oversight which still makes me reel).
Medicine Walk, the new novel from the Kamloops writer, seems poised to change all that.
The novel begins with Franklin Starlight being called to visit his father, Eldon. Franklin, young, but “big for his age,” lives with a surrogate father, “the old man,” on a remote farm in the B. C. Interior. He’s the only parental figure the boy has ever known: his mother is long gone, and his biological father, Eldon, a logger in his younger days, lives in a nearby town, taking on a patchwork of odd jobs and, as soon becomes clear, drinking himself to death.
Eldon has called his son to him to ask him a favour: he wants the boy to lead him into the wilderness, one final journey and one final request:
“‘ I need you to bury me facing east,’ he said. ‘ Sitting up, in the warrior way.’ ‘ You ain’t no warrior.’ ... ‘ I was once,’ he said. ‘ Need to tell you about that. Need to tell you about a lot of things.’”
After some slight hesitation, Franklin agrees to his father’s last wish.
Medicine Walk is, on the surface, the simplest of stories: two men venturing through the wild, one riding a horse, the other walking. The ending is never in question; there is no suspense, no trickery, no sudden reversals of fortune.
But it is what happens on that journey between the two men that makes Medicine Walk one of the finest novels of the year ( yes, it’s only April — I’m confident in that assessment). As they travel, Eldon tells Franklin the stories of his past: his itinerant childhood, his experiences in Korea, the story of his relationship with Franklin’s mother, revealing truths about the man which the boy had never imagined, his character filling in and developing, from the stark clichés of the absentee, alcoholic father into something more complex, more real, tragic, and, in his own way, heroic.
Medicine Walk is a beautiful book, suffused with an intimate awareness of the natural world, and of the intricacies of characters who, on the surface, appear simple and terse. Not a word is wasted, either in the dialogue or the narrative itself, but Wagamese is able to evoke entire worlds out of the simplest of passages, a sensitivity to subtlety and the smallest of gestures. Eldon’s is a resolutely small story, intimately told, but with ripples to the larger world, echoes and iterations of the journey of so many First Nations men through the twentieth century.
As was the case with Indian Horse, though, Wagamese never overplays his hand, never reaches beyond the confines of the personal for larger meaning. It reads like a conscious choice, as if we need reminding that every trend, every sociological movement, is, at its heart, the stories of individual people, individual choices, individual losses.
Perhaps we do need that reminder.
Medicine Walk is not only a graceful book, it is a novel of grace, of coming to terms with hidden truths, of coming to know the secrets behind forbidding appearances, of finding the humanity within strangers.
As one character remarks partway through the book, “It’s all we are in the end. Our stories.” While that might sound like a platitude ( and echoes nicely one of my favourite lines from Doctor Who), it’s key not only to this novel, but to living itself: we are all, and only, the stories we tell, and the stories we carry.
Would that we all had a writer as gifted, as sensitive, as Richard Wagamese to bring them into the light.